Welcome to the latest and greatest incarnation of lastsyllable.net. Things have changed in the blogosphere since I stopped writing in it — I haven’t quit writing entirely; I just tend to hang out in the gated community of LiveJournal, which itself has had several transformations for the worse since 2006, but which is still tolerant of discourses on the relative awesomeness of my lunch today — and again, I’m hesitant to return. The proper tone of accessibility, vast learnings, and not too much navel-gazing is a difficult one to nail on the first several tries.

According to a Wired post by Paul Boutin, I’m supposed to let the blog die and go write on Twitter and Facebook. Twitter hasn’t captured my interest, and on Facebook I mostly like to change my status message and play Tetris Friends. And as John Scalzi pointed out when he linked Boutin’s post, his advice applies if you’re only in the blogosphere to get hundreds of readers or make a big splash on Technorati and similar. I’m not.

I have to admit that my original experiment with this blog was a success — turns out I wasn’t interested enough in Shakespeare as a field to sustain writing about it for a very long time. I probably saved myself thousands of dollars in grad school tuition by starting this blog. However, I had a lot of fun writing about Richard III during the Blogathon (those posts are now readable on one page), and I’d like to do it again with other plays.

The Shakespeare blogosphere is still pretty small, though I’m pleased to discover an ongoing Shakespeare Blog Carnival. Watch for an upcoming post listing Shakespeare blogs of the moment, as well as updated sidebar links. In the meantime, I’ll be easing back into the literary blogosphere through the book How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I expect to quarrel with parts, depending on author Thomas Foster’s critical perspective, so it should be at least as entertaining as my lunch.